BHDandMe was (were?) at Keswick’s TBTL (Theatre By The Lake) a couple of afternoons ago (one of the privileges of being an old tosser) on a trip to see Sense and Sensibility.

I’m a bit of a Jane Austen virgin. I might have read Pride and Prejudice (but I’m not sure I have – if so it was sooo long ago). I have, of course, seen umpteen TV versions of it, which no doubt capture the events, but don’t, I imagine, do anything for the language…and even the facial expressions of people today are mirror images of the faces of their own time, not of the period in which the story was set, and written.

So I came to the adaptation of S&S without a clue what, or who it was about – and yes, TBTL has won me over to reading the book. If the adaptation can be this good, the original must be, well, even better.

And the adaptation was, is good. If you get a chance to go and see it, take it.

The cast was uniformly convincing. I never doubted they were who they pretending to be even for a moment. And what a clever story..though, having encountered several hundred (possibly thousand) stories over the last few years I kinda guessed one of the ‘surprises’ that the plot springs on us. It is a clever plot though, and the play brought that out. I liked the way there was a sort of graded version of ‘love’ on display…the sort that hits you like a hurricane, the sort that grows on you (like roses….?) and the sort that you miss by a long whisker and regret forever. I suspect most of us have tried two out of the three, and possibly the full set (age, now!)

My wife, who has been a professional textile designer, wasn’t too keen on the shiny fabrics – but hey….take a look at the TBTL website here, then go take a look at the play there!

On the subject of plays BHDandMe (well, Me really, with writing buddy Marilyn Messenger) have a small play on in The Studio at TBTL on Saturday, October 20th. It might be worth going along to take a look at that too (but Jane Austen it ain’t). It’s called Telling, and is paired (or rather trio-ed) with two other short dramas. Marilyn and BHD did a collection of short stories together a while back:

Recently I’ve been reading John Steinbeck, and in particular his short story (included in a collection of ‘shorter novels), Of Mice and Men. A level students in the UK might well be familiar with it, but in the stage-play format, and there are two movie versions, from 1939 and sometime in the early 90s. It’s one of those stories from which we get the chance to look at storytelling over several genres -where the story stays the same (or the changes give us opportunity for speculation), but the telling differs.

In the written story everything happens in our heads, triggered by what the words mean, and, make no mistake, by what they mean to us as individual readers, which will not necessarily, in fact will certainly not be exactly the same as they do to the writer. With the adaptation for the stage, much of that triggered meaning will be presented to us by the appearance of the stage, the props, lighting, sound rigs and, not least, the actors. The willing suspension of disbelief that I was taught about when I was a student – our suppression of the knowledge that what we are looking at is not real sky, and real landscape, and real buildings – leaves us to imagine and fill in what the theatre has to leave out. With the further adaptation into film, much of that unreality is made real, and real in a way that might quite different from what those original words conjured in our minds. Disbelief, when we’re talking about movies, might suffer more of an irresistible overwhelming, than a willing suppression.

Which brings me to documentaries on the TV.

Have you noticed, how even when apparent facts are being given, by erudite and enthusiastic presenters, we are being nudged into responding to them in a particular way, not only by the back-scenes – Neil Oliver’s lovely hair blowing in the wind, for example – but by an entirely unnecessary musical soundtrack, a subtle, insidious, almost subliminal indicator about how we ought to feel about what is being said….? After all, these people aren’t telling us something so that we can make our minds up about it. They are recruiting us into the mindsets that they have already adopted.

Back to the original written word.

How do the writers, without the enhancement of emotion-tugging violins, or rousing drums, achieve the same sort of influence?

Well, here it is, officially… the short play, Telling by Me and Marilyn Messenger was one of 3 winning plays and will be performed at the Theatre By The Lake, Keswick, on October 20th. Did you spot the link? It’s there, and here, if you see what I mean….Perhaps I’ll see you there!

Ah! A beer in Vetters Bar in Heidelberg, just off the Haupt Strasse at the Cathedral end. Bliss.

A week last Thursday night….I went to see As You Like It at Keswick’s Theatre By The Lake. It’s the first Shakespeare play I ever saw on stage, at Birmingham Rep, with, seemingly, half the cast of Crossroads in the company. Good old Burton Boys Grammar School (I’m being ironic, you should know), had gone to pains to teach us that when we call a Shakespeare play ‘comic’, we don’t mean it’s funny. Birmingham Rep blew that piece of disinformation right out of the water, and won me over to Shakespeare despite everything that the Education system threw at him.

It must be twenty years since I’d seen the play, and last night I was amazed at how much of it – almost every line – came back to me, though I couldn’t have written down more than a few of them without that prompting. It’s remained my favourite play, though I can see it’s not the slickest (and yes, A Midsummer Night’s Dream pushes a hard second).

The TBTL production was as good as I had come to expect, and celebrated the essential romanticism of the play. Jessica Hayles made a fabulous Rosalind – all Rosalinds should be fabulous. I can remember Eileen Atkins in her Ganymede jeans, and still have the theatre programme somewhere! But Layo-Christina Akinlude as Celia/Aliena gave a master-class in how to play the part that is on stage a lot of the time, but has few lines and very little action. With nods, head-shakes, grins, eye-rolls and other micro-movements she mirrored, re-inforced and nudged our responses to what the other characters were saying and doing. It’s a fine line sort of part to walk between too much and not enough, and she was absolutely spot on.

One slight change to Shakespeare’s script puzzled me. An exchange of words, very near to the end, one that you wouldn’t notice was missing unless you were expecting to hear it, had been excised; like a sprig of bitter herb left out of a gourmet dish.

For the last few months BHDandMe have been part of a play writing group meeting at the Theatre Royal in Dumfries. Co-writer Marilyn Messenger and I have been working on a thirty minute two hander, Telling, and under the direction of Ken Gouge (who directed the Swallow Theatre production of BHDandMe’s play Smokes, a mime with words, back in 2008 [?]) there will be a script-in-hand reading by actors of the Theatre Royal Guild.

Plays by Tom Murray and Vivien Jones will also be featured.

The event will take place from 4.30-6.30pm on Saturday, 12th November, in the Studio at the Theatre Royal. About half an hour of each play will be read, and there will be an informal discussion/feedback session in the bar afterwards. Friends, blog readers & followers are all invited to come along to view, and to chat!

I’m beginning to notice more and more, as if it were widening, the gap between the narrative telling of stories, and the presentation of direct speech. Sometimes, and perhaps more often than used to be the case, I find that my own stories are falling almost exclusively into one or other pattern: narratives have no, or almost no direct speech; dialogues have almost no accompanying narrative. Were it not for the fact that most of my short stories are around, or under the one thousand word mark, I would turn many of them into short plays (which need c5,000 words of direct speech), turning the small amounts of narrative into stage directions, or removing them entirely.

When I am consciously writing plays I do try to limit, and if possible eradicate stage directions – believing that Directors should have the freedom to decide how the words should be uttered.

Moving in the opposite direction, towards a ‘no direct speech’ narrative throws more emphasis on the narrative voice – more awareness in the listener or reader, that here is a he or she telling us a story from a particular viewpoint. Such a narrator reports the events, and the words of the actors, as they appeared to them. During the twentieth century many writers and critics began to move away from this idea, looking for a ‘un-authored’ narrative, with multiple voices, or, as James Joyce suggested, one that had been ‘refined out of existence.’ There was an attempt to spread the narrative across the voices of equally important characters, rather than – as A.E.Coppard suggested, telling the story through the ‘eyes’ of one character only. To me, it has always seemed that so long as one person is providing the words, that person is, mixing the metaphor, calling the tune. The agendas, insights and limitations of the author will inform those of the narrator, however many of them there are, and it maybe that that is what makes any author worth reading.

With an entirely narrated piece, where everything, including the reported words of the characters, is presented through the narrator’s voice, we have come, in a sense, full circle, back to the wholly spoken state: the monologue. The narrator, however, is giving us a monologue that is not, ostensibly, about him or her.

In a curious co-incidence, the same day as I jotted these thoughts down in my notebook, we had a first person monologue that evening at the Facets of Fiction workshop, in which there was no direct speech. Such a piece is likely to look different on the page, and it did. Blocks of text, unbroken by the more fragmented layout in which direct speech is conventionally cast, seem heavier, and the white space on the printed page is far less. But it’s not only the visual that is affected. Reading aloud too, I feel, is a different business when the single voice carries the whole thing.

If this effect is something we don’t welcome in a specific piece, we can get around the problem perhaps, by re-paragraphing, and breaking up the monolithic chunks of text in that way, but paragraphing too affects not only the look of the writing. By throwing emphasis on the sentences that open, and close the paragraphs, it can skew the meaning of a piece. (I looked at this issue briefly earlier in the blog, in reference to a Russian text, the translation of which had been paragraphed entirely differently to the original, and with noticeable effects on the focus of the story.) Arthur Miller, in a preface to an earlier collection, replicated as the introduction to his collected stories, Presence (Bloomsbury, 2009), makes some interesting observations. He is writing from the perspective of a playwright introducing a collection of his own short stories, and has a strong sense of the differences between the two.

‘This was when the author stopped chattering and got out of the way;’

This is the play, by the way. But he says this too…’the novelist’s dialogue is pitched towards the eye…and falls flat when heard.’ And, ‘the dialogue in a story needs to sacrifice its sound.’ Here are two statements which, for me, at least need not be true, and better not be, for he is making an assumption about the printed word which I reject. He does say, of his stories, that ‘some of these stories could never be plays, but some perhaps could have been.’ The distinction he makes centres on sound, but it seems to me, that what the play adds to story, is observation (as does the film), whereas what the story (as text), adds to play or film, is imagination.

Neither pattern, direct speech or narrator, is right or wrong, and neither is a balanced blend of the two a desirable end in its own right, but the differences are worth being aware of, and matching to the stories we want to tell, and the way we want them to be received.

Words on stages, by the way, are part of the thing, where Borderlines, Carlisle Book Festival, 4-6th September, is concerned. You can check out the details here: